Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes: >> If it hasn't happened to you yet, you're either burning a bunch of effort >> that programmers of more automatic systems can put to more productive >> uses ... > > What makes you say that? Avoiding bugs is not a “productive use”?
Avoiding any particular bug through constant and pervasive vigilance is far less productive than using a system where causing that particular type of bug is impossible to begin with. IMO the code you posted has latent bugs as discussed in the other post. It might work at the moment you checked it in but it is brittle. I wouldn't have signed off on it in a code review. > And yet Java apps, for example, are (in)famous for excessive memory > usage compared to those written in non-GC-dependent languages. I think that may mostly be an issue with the bloated nature of most Java apps. Certainly Lisp systems have run in production for decades on machines with much less memory than we would consider acceptable these days for any substantial Python app. It's probably true that gc copying-style gc is more memory hungry than Python's refcount system. Mark-sweep gc should have comparable memory consumption and better speed than refcounting, though less speed than copying. JHC (experimental Haskell compiler) recently started using a mixture of gc and region inference. It will be interesting to see how that works out. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
